Fortunately, the question isn’t simply a matter of adopting flash or falling behind. And the hard disk drives (HDDs) long used by enterprises to store vast quantities of data aren’t suddenly obsolete. Instead, flash technologies can be applied as complementary to existing HDD investments to help enterprises get the most out of their data, and new technologies are emerging to do this in a cost-effective manner.
Case in point: At Seagate, we’re introducing two new additions to our RealStor™ lineup with the RealStor 5 series of all-flash storage and hybrid arrays, giving businesses the kind of high-performance storage that has previously only been accessible to larger data centers—now at an affordable price. Here’s some market context from Eric Burgener, a storage research director at IDC:
“The all-flash array market overall has one of the highest growth rates in external storage, and is expected to grow at a 26.2 percent compound annual growth rate to crest $9.29 billion in 2020. The rapid growth of these systems has been driven by the value that they deliver, but the market for all-flash systems under the $100,000 price point has been slow to take off. Systems like the Seagate RealStor 5005 array, however, set a new bar for value in these price ranges by delivering up to 300,000 IOPS at sub 300 microsecond latencies and 20 terabytes of raw flash capacity in just 2U of rack space, all starting at under $50,000. This is the type of performance, scalability and value that should drive much stronger penetration of all-flash systems for small and medium business and midmarket customers.”
The RealStor 5 series—including the RealStor 5005 and 4005—deliver on this, combining Seagate’s deep software stack and systems approach, including a controller architecture that taps its unique ASIC design, and enables high data availability and performance at aggressive cost points. Seagate technologies such as auto-tiering leverage the benefits of both flash and HDDs by automatically moving data to the most effective media based on application needs, further exemplifying the complementary nature of flash and HDDs in enterprise and cloud deployments. In addition, the system components are built and tested to work together, reducing failure rate and eliminating the need to upgrade an entire system instead of simply one component.
The RealStor 5005
The RealStor 5005, an all-flash array, is ideal for demanding data environments where speed and latency are critical. Think multi-branch office environments, which typically have lower capacity requirements but high performance needs. The system can achieve 400,000 IOPS at 1 millisecond latency—and at aggressive cost points. For environments where latency is paramount, the RealStor 5005 can go even further, reaching latencies sub 300 microseconds for 300,000 IOPS—far faster than the 1 millisecond classic industry benchmark for all-flash array response time.
The RealStor 4005
For organizations not needing the full horsepower offered by the RealStor 5005, the RealStor 4005 is an ideal option. It is available in three personalities: as an all-flash array, a hybrid array mixing flash with HDDs, or as an all-HDD array. The RealStor 4005 is ideal for applications like video surveillance, where quick access to some data is necessary, but a large amount of data remains “cold” and unused. The RealStor 4005 with the hybrid variant can automatically promote data to flash if fast access is required, but otherwise keeps data stored on cost effective HDDs.
